An op-ed from the Department of Having Your Cake and Eating it Too.

Games that allow you to gain new levels for your character by defeating enemies or accomplishing tasks create a carefully balanced risk/reward environment that effectively trains you to seek out the situations with the most potential for beneficial character development. Those rewards could be special weapons, decorative (i.e. not functional) items, or most importantly, experience points. Experience points (and the increased character levels they eventually bring) are central to practically every role-playing game and, increasingly, other genres that throw them in as a "role-playing element." They're the most important reward to be gained in these games because they determine the strength of a character and what kind of weapons and capabilities that character can have.

In a game like Borderlands 2, leveling up doesn't just make you a bit stronger or give you a few more hit points. It's not just incremental improvement. Rather, it allows you to unlock new capabilities for your character, such as the ability to stab enemies while cloaked, flipping off foes with a single-finger salute, or sending in a giant robot that shoots lasers from its eyes to wipe out the bad guys for you. New strategies and tactics are opened up by increasing your level.

Everything in these games is subject to the experience point economy. Without character leveling, games that are based on this kind of economy would be insanely boring, because they would lack the primary motivator of character improvement. Let's face it, most people love these kinds of games because of the character leveling and all that comes with it. It's the apotheosis of the "boss battle" motivator in classic action games.

But when you've put 60 hours into Skyrim, Mass Effect, or Borderlands 2 only to reach an artificial level cap, the risk/reward economy suddenly changes for the worse. When you hit that level cap, you are effectively the Man/Ogre/Zero who "has it all." For many players, myself included, that means the motivation to keep playing dies, or at least is greatly reduced. The careful economy of experience points the game has spent so long setting up suddenly breaks down when the leveling motivation is taken away.

Many people won't mind the lack of experience points so long as they can continue to seek out better loot, better weapons, etc. But these things can cap out as well, as they're often designed into the level capping system itself. More problematically, in many games you can get very high level loot early on, either through dumb luck, a pre-order bonus, promotions such as Borderlands 2's Shift codes, or in some unsavory cases, microtransaction purchases. Continuing to play in the hopes of getting better loot when you already have plenty of legendary weapons just isn't a big motivator for me or many other gamers.

Yes, many people will continue to play games after they've reached the level cap, and many game designers have tried to come up with ways to keep a game interesting after players have maxed out the character level. Consider the huge bosses that require multiplayer fights in MMOs, the bizarre new tasks like the "build a house and adopt a kid" paths in Skyrim's Hearthfire DLC, and so on. But I would rather see designers address the fundamental problem of the motivation equation being broken.

Enlarge/ At level 50, this character has unlocked as many items from his skill tree as he can. But there's so much more he could do, if only he had more skill points available. Sure, I could respec and assign my points elsewhere, but I want to have it all.

Why not have infinite leveling? In a game like Borderlands 2 where the weapons are procedurally generated, why can't the game similarly continue to scale up the difficulty of the enemies and in-game challenges ad infinitum? This might lower the number of players who want to grind through multiple playthroughs, but players would at least be able to get through the story and earn all the game's achievements without hitting a frustrating brick wall of character progression, and they could even continue to be challenged well past the formal "end" of the game.

As it is, halfway through playing the new, more difficult True Vault Hunter Mode in Borderlands 2, I hit the level cap, which means I'm reluctant to play the latest DLC, or even to finish the mode I'm currently working through. Sure, there's still a completion achievement motivating me to slog on and finish up the mode. But consider this: Gearbox is going to raise the level cap at some point. I know it's coming and so do many other players. So we'll refrain from playing until then, waiting for a time when our efforts will be rewarded with experience points and real character progress rather than just chievos.

A well-crafted leveling system creates a feedback loop that makes many of today's games truly addictive experiences. When a level cap effectively short-circuits that loop, it makes the whole experience that much less compelling. It's certainly far from the worst problem in the world, even from this privileged, first-world gamer's perspective.

But I'll say it again: level capping sucks.

Promoted Comments

I am oblivious to this kind of motivation for playing, therefore my comment might be off for some reason. But anyway, if as the level of the character increases the level of the enemies and loot increases at the same pace, what is the point in levelling at all?

The third paragraph explains this a bit. You actually get new features when your level increases. It changes the gameplay.

It also introduces metagame elements. If the enemies match your level, but your weapons are a few levels worse, you're motivated to hunt down new weapons that match your own rank, to replace the underpowered old ones. Once you hit the cap (50 in Borderlands 2, for example) and you have some level 50 weapons, there's not a whole lot of point in hunting down even more guns. If the level cap went up, that whole aspect of the game gets reinvigorated.

Spoken like a true addict. Thank you for clearly pointing out the easy to implement crack with which we allow game designers to manipulate us with. Better yet, rather than pointing out an alternative to this level grind mechanic, the solution to the problem of cutting off my leveling up "fix", infinite levels!Genius, spoken like a true addict.Keep in mind, I'm not excluding myself from this addiction, just pointing it out.Recognizing you have a problem is of course the first step to recovery (and maybe new/better games.)

The main concern in the article is over a hard level cap changing the power growth equation. In the comments we've extended that to maintaining growth relevance to game play regardless of the power growth metric.

The point is more that a hard cap is a crude limiting practice that ruins power growth and can negatively impact normal game play if the cap is hit before the game is completed than that leveling should be endless.

54 posts | registered Jun 6, 2011

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War Stories | Ultima Online: The virtual ecology

When creating Ultima Online, Richard Garriott had grand dreams. He and Starr Long planned on implementing a virtual ecology into their massively multiplayer online role-playing game. It was an ambitious system, one that would have cows that graze and predators that eat herbivores. However, once the game went live a small problem had arisen...

War Stories | Ultima Online: The virtual ecology

War Stories | Ultima Online: The virtual ecology

When creating Ultima Online, Richard Garriott had grand dreams. He and Starr Long planned on implementing a virtual ecology into their massively multiplayer online role-playing game. It was an ambitious system, one that would have cows that graze and predators that eat herbivores. However, once the game went live a small problem had arisen...

Ken Fisher
Ken is the founder & Editor-in-Chief of Ars Technica. A veteran of the IT industry and a scholar of antiquity, Ken studies the emergence of intellectual property regimes and their effects on culture and innovation. Emailken@arstechnica.com//Twitter@kenfisher

162 Reader Comments

Trying to type this without using specific game examples is challenging.

Hard capping of levels is a little awkward, but is something a player notices only in games where the depth of character power growth is focused around their level. When you use level as a method of capping every other power type you end up with too little diversity of play style as players reach the cap and achieve an optimal play style. In games where the challenge scales with the players level, a player can often feel like their level is an unimportant cosmetic effect. If those two problems show up in the same game, you end up with all your power being focused around an unimportant cosmetic effect. This is what prompts player aversion to leveling in games.

The best way to avoid this is to include several different paths of progression in player power as well as a need for increased player ability to overcome obstacles that isn't tied to, but rather supported by, player power.

Dividing levels in to smaller subcategories is one way to deal with this, allowing players to move around how they play to take advantage of not just beneficial play but efficient leveling progress. This allows players to chose how they play and even force power by focusing on what they want while also allowing players with no specific desire beyond power to achieve these goals through other methods.

Another method is by diversifying the reward structure in a similar fashion. If a player's only motivation is improved numbers then the desire to hack and exploit is present since you don't need guided progress. Also, when those numbers are tempered by difficulty scaling they become unimportant cosmetic effects as I mentioned earlier. If the reward structure is diversified in a fashion that respects each reward system as separate as well as examines their interrelationship a player can again pursue material conquest along a larger variety of paths.

If you consider just the bare mathematics of value, it's obvious that adding an extra digit to a random number improves the variety far more than simply increasing the individual values.

In short, if there is a cap to some amount of progress a player shouldn't be interacting with that cap, they should be focusing on what they can do within more practical caps of time and efficiency allowing each player to set their own.

The problem is balance. More specifically, the problem is the difficulty of balance, beyond pre-determined level caps, scales way out of proportion to the return in player enjoyment (and thus in developer investment).

Linear numerical advancement - more HP, better AC, whatever - is boring. Ken, you make the converse of this point by describing the fun of RPG character advancement as consonant with its ability to change the nature, not just the numbers, of gameplay.

As a paradigmatic example, I'd identify that magic level in many MMOs that opens up riding/flying/whatever to award faster transit. That's a transformational change in experience.

Game designers know this. That's why skill-tree-type mechanisms try hard to incorporate transformational changes - new abilities, instead of enhancements to existing ones. You don't start playing Skyrim with every dragon shout (or any, if I recall right. It's been a little while).

Matching those transformational changes in player capabilities to the environment is hard. Matching them to other players, who are going through their own different transformational development and are much more resourceful than AIs, is very much harder. How many forum tears have been shed over this? Oceans. Balance is hard. Balance is hard.

If player advancement were just numbers, balance would be easy - just jack up the NPCs' hp, damage and whatever according to a one-variable function. This is actually what Borderlands does, and it's one reason that game's balance is out of whack: PCs advance non-linearly in abilities, NPCs advance linearly in stats.

That's still a difficult balance to maintain, and that difficulty increases exponentially as you add new races/classes/specialties/whatever - essentially, dimensions to the balance matrix. Striking that balance is worth doing (in time=money) for those advancement phases most (or many) of your players are likely to experience.

It's not worth it, though, to developers to try and ensure games are balanced ad infinitum because the number of players who reach successively higher levels will drop off exponentially. The marginal cost of balancing to developers quickly exceeds the return in terms of players who will ever experience the results of that effort.

Level cap, skill cap, hard cap, soft cap: it's all the same, and it's all about balancing. Beyond a certain point, especially in a crowded marketplace, it just isn't worth it.

So no, level capping doesn't suck. Balancing sucks. But you can't have the latter without the former.

There was a game called Asheron's Call; in the early days, the level cap was 126. But, and I'm really talking about the early days, it was seemingly impossible to ever get this high. This was largely due to the fact that the experience required for each increasing level was "psuedoexponential" (and admittedly, also because there wasn't much content that scaled well to the higher levels at that point), but the idea is that it allowed for the feeling of always working toward something, but "never" actually being able to reach it.

I know this comes with a host of problems, but I think somebody should again consider the idea of a soft level cap (with a hard cap in the distance). It relaxes the problem of the hard cap without causing a seemingly endless (and therefore pointless) leveling experience. At level 90, I remembered feeling terribly far away from 126--but I felt determined because there were players who where 100, and therefore more powerful than me.

[Edit]

I realize that devs might opt to take a game with a hard cap and simply drastically increase the grinding required to get there. But, while I don't have a solution to this particular response, I do find that it misses the spirit of the soft level cap.

I would counter by saying that in general, there's too much room to grow. Many adventures have the protagonist go from taking 10 HP with an attack to 10,000. That seems pretty ridiculous to me. I'd find gameplay much more interesting if one had to take more tradeoffs into consideration. You can't keep grinding until you can wipe out all foes with a single hit, but rather, you have to train yourself for the specific skills a particular mission demands, possibly to a real detriment to other skills that were important in previous and later missions. It also means that there won't be this enormous disconnect in the toughness of a particular environment, where the first boss you fight couldn't put up a real fight against the lowest level mooks of the final area. I'm not saying that there isn't growth occurring, but rather, that it's a more reasonable growth.

And if nothing changes, I'd say the most appropriate way to deal with level caps is sharp increases in the amount of work required to advance past a certain level, so it's not a hard level cap, but it's increasingly unreasonable to try and go beyond a certain point. The Paper Mario series had a really interesting way of approaching it IMO, because instead of increasing the amount of EXP needed to level up, it was always 100 EXP to level up and the amount of EXP you received decreased. IIRC, in the first one, you reached a point where you didn't receive any EXP, so there was a hard cap on leveling up. In thousand year door, they made it more forgiving, so you could always get one EXP from a battle, but it's excruciating to spend 100 battles just for a minor upgrade, so players would typically avoid it.

I'm all for shooting holes in broken systems, but where does the solution lie? I don't have broad enough experience in all rpg leveling styles to come up with something that covers all level caps in all games. However, having played Borderlands 1 ( and hitting the extended cap) and it's sequel, I know it'd be nice to fill out that skill tree, but that's just a finite increase. What else needs to increase? The guns, the enemies, and your stats ( HP, etc.) The problem with that is summed up in three letters: PvP. If you have someone who has 24/7 to grind out an unstoppable force of PVP power, you know the online game will be choked with characters far beyond what most players can field. Borderlands can be played cooperatively, I know, but when the denizens of Pandora are supposed to scale up with your party, and you have a bunch of level 1 players with an arbitrarily high-level player, you get some massive disparity in combat effectiveness. So maybe you implement a matchmaking system? Limit who can play with who? I rather like Slogger's suggestion, where you get diminishing returns. Then, those who want to play on can "level up", but not necessarily get more powerful beyond a certain point. Prestige, yes, power, some, but motivation to keep leveling? Perhaps diminished, but at least there isn't a waist-high wall there anymore.

Shift codes give you a rare weapon at your current level. For playthrough 1 that will be better than a blue or green for something like 3-6 levels, but in playthrough 2 even a trash white item might be better in 3-4 levels. An orange / legendary could be better at even the same level.

And for BL2 the pre-order bonus weapons were only good for the first couple of levels. The SMG was so bad I'd sell it at the first vending machine.

I totally agree that level capping sucks. In a single player or co-op multiplayer game, it makes no sense to have a cap. Just let the levels keep coming. Who cares if you become over powered for the content?

I suppose if the enemies are procedurally generated they could boost their stats to make them still a challenge, although often this can take away the fun of leveling in the first place. I think a better alternative to that would be to simply throw larger and larger groups of enemies at you.

For example, in Oblivion, rather than a wolf leveling up with you and suddenly morphing into a bear, imagine a pack of wolves attacks you! That sounds a lot more exciting, makes you still feel like a high level powerhouse, and keeps the game interesting overall.

Of course, level caps make sense in competitive online games. Some people can play and play, and if I hop on and a level 2785 druid one shots me, that doesn't sound like fun at all. I think Asheron's Call had no level cap, it just became exponentially more difficult to level the higher you got.

Still, it's a great point, and I hope at least some game companies are looking into a way to fix, or at least improve that situation.

I think, at a minimum, the game should be playable such that you never hit the level cap while playing everything available in the game. So, in the case of BL2:

Normal Mode + all side quests + TVH Mode + all TVM side quests + all "badass acheivements" = do this without hitting a level cap.

That's a good summary of my position on the subject. I'd even be fine with the toughest achievements being borderline, so long as you don't hit cap while completing the storyline and all side quests.

Trying to think of a good series that does this and I keep coming back to Etrian Odyssey, where I've never completely leveled due to their absurd leveling schemes (Etrian Odyssey II was possibly the worst, requiring you to max a character's level to 70, then restart at level 30 and level to 71, then restart at level 30 and repeat this process until you maxed the level cap at 99). However, that level of completionism isn't required to beat the game or even the bonus bosses (though they will require some serious level grinding).

I've not completed the game, but I hear that DA:2 has a cap that can't be reached. Capping at level 50, but even with all the side quests, you run out of ways to gain experience around level 30. I wouldn't mind more games designed in that manner; where the level cap was double the target level but impossible to reach.

You would have to change the whole character system in Skyrim if you wanted infinite leveling.

In a broad RPG, a character is a playstyle, first and foremost. For me, the point is to get the playstyle working, then enjoy it when it is fully developed and working as intended.

Leveling for infinity just means +100 hp to the monster and +10 damage to the sword. Creativity in games is limited by the budget, not where the level cap kicks in.

I don't think a little "hunter gatherer" dopamine reward of +10 more damage is worth the harm infinite levels does to the game balancing.

Skyrim has some unexplored leveling options beyond "+10"ing for advancement. The level of power your character brings to bear in most Elder Scroll games by the end is enough to warrant some development time in mass combat AI, your character has one or two items that makes him a mortal god. Armies should be hunting you down as armies, not waiting at home for you to sneak through and put glowing blue arrows in everyone's knees. Respecting that and putting focusing upper advancement on abilities that influenced mass combat would give players a soft cap where they were better off focusing on smaller confrontation abilities early on. Some additional ai focused on large encounters and city combat and suddenly you have secondary progress that serves as a cap, a reward, a promise of progress and additional play style options.

Capping is a balancing mechanic. The intent is that your character is not supposed to be able to "do everything". The cap prevents this.

There are games without caps. There are games with caps. It all depends on the design.

Keep in mind you have a reskill option in Borderlands. Be happy you have it. I've played real MMOs where either there isn't a reskill option, or there is but it costs you XP in a main stat to use such that if you don't "over-level", you lose your last few main stat levels.

Sure, you cap out at 80. But you still collect XP and each time you fill the bar you get a skill point. They can be spent on more than skills tho (i managed to get all the character skills before level 80 thanks to leveling and on map skill point "quests"), for example parts for weapons with elaborate looks.

You would have to change the whole character system in Skyrim if you wanted infinite leveling.

In a broad RPG, a character is a playstyle, first and foremost. For me, the point is to get the playstyle working, then enjoy it when it is fully developed and working as intended.

Leveling for infinity just means +100 hp to the monster and +10 damage to the sword. Creativity in games is limited by the budget, not where the level cap kicks in.

I don't think a little "hunter gatherer" dopamine reward of +10 more damage is worth the harm infinite levels does to the game balancing.

I don't know. In my opinion, this is just a foolish way to do it. It doesn't mean it's the only way. My example above shows something that would be fun, especially if you continued to level to higher and higher points. Adding in extra random enemies for every level or two would make battles more and more epic. This seems like a good compromise. You might max out your skill tree, but levels could still give you a boost to stats. From there, you simply run into larger and larger hordes of enemies. If necessary, minor stat boosts could be given to them as well to help introduce a bit of balance.

Those are things that could all be done through automatically generated content. It wouldn't even require specifically designed scenarios. unless of course you're in a dungeon where the horde of enemies won't even fit in the room.

But I think the balance issue is a bit of a missed point. Of course you want balance up to an extent, but is it even necessary once someone has most likely already blown past most of the content? It seems more like something to give to people who loved the game/world and want to keep exploring/fighting/playing, and I don't see anything wrong with that.

Another example is Dota, and the myriad of minigames made for Warcraft 3. People would continue to wander around farming, leveling, etc, even though there wasn't a whole lot left to do, just because it was fun if it was done right.

As baloroth and others have said, there's mechanical and content limitations on how much you can transform the experience by adding an endless grind. That whole "New strategies and tactics are opened up by increasing your level." you mention at the beginning of the article stands out because one of the juiciest points of counter-attack against "well, why don't you just make it scale indefinitely?" rather than an argument for it. You don't make it scale indefinitely because eventually you're not going to get anything out of it besides an increasingly shallow hit from watching the numbers *ding*.

There's also the whole pool of gameplay that revolves around creating challenge and interesting decisions through limits on what you can do. Sometimes, even before you run out of new capabilities you could give the player, you'll make the gameplay less interesting by doing so.

On a tangential note, the first time I read the sentence "the apotheosis of the 'boss battle' motivator in classic action games", I read "the antithesis of the 'boss battle' motivator in classic action games". That makes a heck of a lot more sense to me than what you said- although in truth it's not so black-or-white in either direction. When I think about boss battles, skill is the first word that comes to mind, along with some knowledge. (use the bubble against Wily in Mega Man 2) There are associations of having progressed your character's abilities enough to beat the boss, too, but unless you grew up on a diet of grindy JRPGs I can't imagine that's the first things that comes to mind. My personal associations aside, even when that *is* the association that comes to mind, your notion of endlessly scaling enemies are in many ways the, well, antithesis of that: you'll never beat the boss, you'll never overcome the hardest enemy of the game, and pretty quickly your illusion of becoming the biggest badass in the game will be shattered by the realization that you're treading water as your enemies scale with you and the game never changes.

This is just not a very well thought out article. It seems like your real problem is either with pacing, or is a very Borderlands 2 specific argument. Either:

A) You're playing a game that's progression-centric, you're playing it primarily for the progression, and the game has run out of progression but apparently you don't feel you're done with the game yet. If you haven't finished the campaign yet, that's a perfectly reasonable gripe, but it's not a universal invalidation of level caps.

or

B) Borderlands 2, specifically, is a good candidate for endless scaling-numbers progression. It's a game that's all about finding progressively larger-numbered, procedurally-generated weapons, and there's no reason for that to stop. This seems pretty reasonable to me too: the Borderlands formula seems to lend itself to endless progression extremely well. Once again, however, that's not a universal invalidation of level caps.

Skyrim has some unexplored leveling options beyond "+10"ing for advancement. The level of power your character brings to bear in most Elder Scroll games by the end is enough to warrant some development time in mass combat AI, your character has one or two items that makes him a mortal god. Armies should be hunting you down as armies, not waiting at home for you to sneak through and put glowing blue arrows in everyone's knees. Respecting that and putting focusing upper advancement on abilities that influenced mass combat would give players a soft cap where they were better off focusing on smaller confrontation abilities early on. Some additional ai focused on large encounters and city combat and suddenly you have secondary progress that serves as a cap, a reward, a promise of progress and additional play style options.

This sounds very much like something I am trying to get at. We need to stop thinking in terms of infinite advacement as that straight line of "more balance = more stats to small groups of enemies" and look at other methods of making late game high level combat fun. And in my opinion, the answer is larger scale epic battles, not 1 on 1 battles against a ridiculously overpowered wolf.

The problem with putting in stuff like mass battles, rather than +10 to damage, is that it takes a lot of development time, but because it is beyond where most people will finish playing (e.g. in Skyrim), not everyone who plays will see it.

In Skyrim, you can finish everything playable in the main game before hitting the cap. Providing special rewards to people who keep on leveling is not an efficient use of development resources.

Of course not every game is the same, but this basic dilemma is true for a lot of RPGs.

Skyrim has a good feature for people who want stuff that only a small minority of players will get to: the Creation Kit.

Funny ... I just ran into the same thing playing Borderlands 1 this week. Finally got my soldier to 69, finished all the quests (except for crawmermax), and ... welp, this is boring, time to move on.

The kick in the nuts to that is I really like Borderlands as a fun shooter game. So, I played with the sniper, soldier and siren just to keep playing. But, eventually it comes to an end. The level caps hit about the time you finish both playthroughs and some DLC's. So, at least it was well paced.

Now, I appreciate that you want to max out your entire character, but I found in games like Morrowind & Oblivion, where you can spam your skills until all of them are maxed, it is both good & bad. The good is that you can become awesome at everything regardless of levelling...you just have to put forth effort into the skills. So, even once you hit "level caps" on character, you can still screw around with skills you suck at by levelling them.

However, my problem was that in Morrowind/Oblivion, they start out with character archetypes, but since you could master all skills with effort the archetype didn't mean jack. Ok, I start out with a Warrior. He can level his kill skills easier. But, I was able to spam-train my magic skills to become a grandmaster magician, too. I found that absurd.

In Skyrim, I found it better, b/c while you could still max out skills, your levels let you gain specialties. So, your warrior with 100 in a magic w/o specialties in it would never be as awesome as the Mage that dumped their specialties into their 100 magic.

This prompted me to play through Skyrim as a sword-n-shielder, archer and then mage, b/c there was finally a difference in build-out that mattered.

However, I do appreciate Borderlands ability to re-spec my character. I'm a casual player, and I don't want to sit through the torture of Diablo 2 all over again by having to totally redo a character just b/c I spent some skill points in the wrong place.

Of course, hitting a level cap doesn't mean the game has ended. It just means one part of progression in the game has completed. It may have been dominant throughout the game, sure, but this is why they call the content after this "end of game content".

Levelling doesn't have to be emphasized, and level caps decried, if the game is designed around it properly. This end of game content may provide more tasks to complete that isn't dependent on level. They may include puzzles and physical challenges that will require gaining skill (on the part of the player--not in-game "skills" bought with "skill points" or anything of the sort) to complete. Or, they may de-emphasize levelling to the point that it isn't missed.

Guild Wars 1 had a very low level cap at level 20. Most people could achieve the cap after a week or two of casual play. However, at that point you've probably only experienced about 10% or so of the game. Beyond that is campaign progression, skill acquisition, map exploration, and learning new builds. Because you've acquired all the attribute points and the like by this time, and you only have 8 skill slots in your skill bar, you are encouraged in that game to mix and match skills, finding a build that works and testing strategies for different missions and quests. And you still can gain better armor, find new buffs and inscriptions, and upgrade your equipment.

So, even though the game had a miniscule level cap that was quickly reached, there was so much more to do in the game, and you could easily find motivation to continue.

If once you reach the level cap you find your motivation to continue playing to wane, either that means the game's end-of-game content was poorly designed, or you've simply played the game through, and you're done.

However, my problem was that in Morrowind/Oblivion, they start out with character archetypes, but since you could master all skills with effort the archetype didn't mean jack. Ok, I start out with a Warrior. He can level his kill skills easier. But, I was able to spam-train my magic skills to become a grandmaster magician, too. I found that absurd.

This is the eternal Elder Scrolls argument. No-one knows where it started, no-one can say when it will end.

My solution is much the same as yours: I visualize my character before I start playing, I only use certain skills, and when I stop leveling (long before the cap), I enjoy the challenge of using the playstyle that I designed.

To see the rest of the skillset, I make up a different character and play other quests with it. So for Skyrim, I had a thief, a mage, a death knight, and an evil vampire cat.

When you spam skills you aren't interested in just to get more hit points, all that happens is that the game becomes extremely boring, even when you are not jumping in place.

I am oblivious to this kind of motivation for playing, therefore my comment might be off for some reason. But anyway, if as the level of the character increases the level of the enemies and loot increases at the same pace, what is the point in levelling at all?

The third paragraph explains this a bit. You actually get new features when your level increases. It changes the gameplay.

And this is precisely why the desire expressed in the article (while it would be nice) is flat-out impossible to fulfill. Even if you have the best game designers in the world, who have an endless stream of interesting character progression ideas to put in the game (which is unlikely by itself), they have a finite amount of time. At some point, the game needs to ship, and any levels past a certain point in the progression will be stat increases, nothing more.

This is, of course, boring. The same gameplay (but this time with bigger numbers) is not a fun system of progression, but until game designers have infinite time to implement their infinite leveling system, it's simply not possible to have any other kind of infinite progression.

So, designers can't keep the fun going forever. Why not just put as much as they can fit in the game, and leave the level cap off, then? Except they already do put as much as they can fit into the game. So all you're really doing is taking existing game structure and player progression, and tacking an endless sea of stat upgrades onto the end of that. But that's not fun... so why do that?

Like I said, the idea expressed in the article is nice. But it cannot come to fruition in the real world in any sort of interesting, well-done way.

This is a fascinating perspective that raises so many questions. I've been playing Guild Wars 2 for weeks now -- to a lesser extent the game's design philosophy, and to a greater extent the community is trending toward an aversion and hatred for vertical progression of any sort. I also gathered the same sentiment from the TF2 community when they started adding item drops. I saw players wondering why TF2 didn't just grant you all the gameplay items at the start, items which, arguably, are a "horizontal" progression.

Is the anti-progression I have experienced some new-age phenomenon, or has there always been this community division between pro-progression and anti-progression? These seem to map roughly to the two big motivations of play: immersion (progression fulfills a satisfying power fantasy) VS challenge (play to get more skilled). Should developers cater to both crowds simultaneously?

I think this might very well be related to the aging gamer demographics. As people who were very big gamer in their youth get older, they tend to have less time to play.

Their experience makes them excellent gamers: they have the core skills to play games well, but cannot match the sheer amount of time that teenagers can put into gaming.

Games with gating mechanisms and vertical progression favor those with more time than skills. Even when they aren't playing competitive modes, skilled gamers with less time will have to slog through months of easy, boring content in order to get to play something that's meant to challenge them. I play Guild Wars 2 too. I don't have a lot of time to play, so I haven't yet attained level 80. Solo PvE in Guild Wars 2 at my level is boringly easy; but outside of PvP (which doesn't have progression at all), I am disadvantaged when I want to play the endgame content (for instance, in WvWvW, my equipment does not make me competitive).

I suppose the cynical answer might be that they want to sell you leveling in DLC, but I suspect in the case of BL2, it will not be part of the DLC. Gearbox's president has suggested that, at least.

That would be surprising. They raised the cap 3 times in separate DLC for BL1 (from 40-50, 50-51, and 51-61 IIRC).

On the other hand, they've already released 2 DLCs with no increase to the caps for this game, so you may be right.

No, that isn't correct - there was no level cap increase for the first two DLC's (Dr Ned, Moxxi), they raised the cap from 50 to 61 for the third one and around the time of the fourth one they released a patch separate to the DLC that increased the level cap to 69.

I think the Borderlands 2 level cap is just badly implemented, I don't mind so much that you can't get all the skills as that makes the choice more important but what is poor is that you max out at level 50 long before you reach the end of the true vault hunter mode whereas in Borderlands 1 from what I remember you max out not long before the end of the second playthrough as it should be.

As for the gap to the enemies always being the same therefore levelling is pointless that usually isn't true and certainly isn't the case in BL2. As you level up you unlock more skills which means your strategy changes as well to accommodate the new skills. The types of enemies also change on the second playthrough which forces much more careful weapon choice and use, in the first game I went through both playthroughs without changing my guns much but in BL2 I have to spend a lot more time trying to make sure I have a optimal combination for the increasingly difficult and more complex enemies I'm facing.

It's a matter of balance. It's very difficult to make content that scales evenly along with player power, and the way MMOs and most other games with level caps create difficult endgame content is by making sure that player power is limited. I also think that having the cap there as a goal is an important motivator to some people. Removing the cap would add some futility into the whole thing, as you know you will never reach the end. I suspect, as with most game design choices, you have to pick your audience and realize some people are going to be unhappy.

...except... these games almost always raise their level caps eventually. A new player to Skyrim today, who buys DLC, has several additional levels available to them. So, why not have unlimited to begin with, and let the player progress at their own preference?

The problem with that reasoning is that level cap increases do not usually (usually) just consist of a level cap increase, with no additional skills/perks/whatever else the game has. They add more. So the real thing that the level cap increase adds is not the additional cap, but the new skills and designer time that were put into them.

And even if the level cap increase were just "more levels" with nothing else, that would be boring. What makes game's systems interesting is when you have to make hard choices, choosing one character-defining ability over another. But that's the only way to do what you want, because the former option is limited by time rather than desire. Game designers are already putting everything they can into the progression system.

That's why they don't just make the level cap (cap + n) at launch. That would be a boring level cap increase. The designers need that intervening year (or however long) to come up with new game design, and make a level cap increase which is actually engaging.

I have been completely shocked by the fact that you have an issue with the level capping, not the leveling itself. Indeed, I can understand how somebody can be fooled into thinking that growing stats, unlocking skills and acquiring stronger items are fun because of the immediate reward, but I simply do not understand how anybody can find the leveling progression fun in itself.

What makes a game fun? For me, it's the story and/or a fair challenge. Most leveling systems go against those principles. Indeed, the story breaks if the character's level does not match what is going on in the scenario, and the fair challenge breaks when the player behaves differently from the game designer's expectations.

The way I see it, leveling can only have the following purposes:- Train the player- Automatically balance the difficulty level- Story developmentThat's why in my opinion leveling works well in most JRPGs but not FPSes.

The argumentation in this article against level caps is, from what I gather, character growth and having all gameplay options available. I perfectly understand the latter, although a much better solution would be to have those options available right from the start. As for the former, it seems completely ridiculous to me that anybody might want to have better stats only for the sake of defeating enemies more quickly. What's the point? A game should become increasingly harder to stay challenging, not easier! Reaching a godlike status is not a worthy challenge in itself either, since it only requires farming through a repetitive task.

So please enlighten me: are most players just so stupid that they see the illusion of an achievement as a worthy achievement, or am I missing something critical in how those players interpret their gameplay experience with such games?

Currently (as in the last six months) I've been playing Diablo, which is, in my opinion, not a very good game until you reach the level 60 cap. I hate the the slog to build my character up to that level and wish it didn't exist.

I guess some people like to play a game to build their character up, but I don't. I think a game should be fun to play regardless of whether or not you have put weeks/months of time into improving it.

In my opinion, the only thing that should change the longer you play a game is your own skill at playing it. I like how Diablo and Halo both have some kind of difficulty setting, where experienced players face the same foes but the difficulty setting is much higher (or in multiplayer halo, how it matches you up with other players of similar skill level). The difficulty setting isn't something you work your way up to, it's just something you pick. In diablo the harder levels give you more gold/loot, and in Halo the harder levels make the AI (or multiplayer opponents) more intelligent/skilled and therefore more fun.

So please enlighten me: are most players just so stupid that they see the illusion of an achievement as a worthy achievement, or am I missing something critical in how those players interpret their gameplay experience with such games?

There's no shortage of people who champion even pure "grind" in games like WOW. It gives a little rush.

Batman: Arkham City has a leveling mechanic and still provides compelling gameplay after maxing out in the form of an excellent and captivating story (this part is *super* subjective), endless-mode arena fights, and the "new game plus" mode (which could just be considered another leveling mechanic, but one where the player levels up in game-skill, as opposed to numbers in the game going up).

One of the real flaws to this type of system is the simple fact that they create the game where you can "level cap" in a fairly short time frame. The is partly due to the "Skinner Box" nature of a lot of these games, but there are ways around this.

Take a game like WoW..... which has "gear leveling" after you level cap. People play that game and get to max level (currently 90) and then TECHNICALLY continue progressing their character at a slower rate of improvement through "gear leveling" (my term for it anyway). I did an analysis of this for TankSpot a couple years back, and the reality was, the gear improvements at max level at that time, were roughly equivalent to another 10 "character levels" worth of gameplay.

Ways to fix this?

1) Implement a GW2 type system where content is available at all/multiple levels, but avatars/content scales to a set level, with certain earned items intact. They do this there by scaling health pools/damage capacity to the dungeon, but players retain all earned skills and weapons regardless of level. Don't strictly limit content to "character level". Make content accessible fairly well across-the-board to most levels, and make it so it'll be of varying challenge regardless. Again, GW2 does this nicely

2) Increase the difficulty/slowness of leveling. A fine example.... Dungeons and Dragons (3rd Edition or earlier). The way progression was in that classic pen-and-paper game was SLOW if you implemented it as per the rule set. It could be well over a year before a player would sniff "max level" (if they could at all). The downside is, for video games, MOST players simply aren't this patient and THEY WANT MORE POWER NOW! The positive side.... you havea more "realistic" progression of an avatar in comparison to real life improvement. Simple fact being that, real people, don't "gain experience" and max out their full potential in a couple weeks, if ever. Impose an improvement curve where there is "character improvement" occurring, but at an ever slower pace.

3) Lean more heavily on the improvement of the player's skills vice "character improvement. This is probably the most frequently ignored and overlooked "leveling". Again, in my history of playing multiple MMO's, WoW in particular, a lot of players get to level cap and then whine about the game despite not having completed all of it. instead, it becomes an issue of "I need more X in order to do that" instead of realizing their personal gameplay skill is what is truly holding them back. MANY game devs simply suck at and fail at showing a player HOW they can improve (hence, the development of websites like TankSpot, which are dedicated to player improvement).

4) Balance leveling so as to not create "god-like" characters. I believe honestly that you HAVE to have an end-goal in mind. You do not want to be in a never-ending arms race. You do want people to feel that there is progress being made..... but not at the expense making a player overtly dominant over other players around that same benchmark.

A fine example of this? PvP in WoW at "max level". I say "max level" because due to "gear leveling", a player that is supposedly level 90 is not necessarily equivalent to another player at level 90 due to the "hidden' level of gear. People will see the "level" of the character, but that is misleading. it DOESN'T accurately reflect the true output of that character. Again, the PERFORMANCE difference (or potential)between those two "equal" level characters can actually be similar to the difference between a level 80 and level 90.

What would probably work better would be if there were a "composite score" of some type that would be used as the ultimate "balance" indicator. That composite score should be utilized to "equalize" battle, particularly in player versus player confrontations. I would also add the ability for people to voluntarily pursue more difficult match-ups if so desired, so long as there is a "you asked for it" type of warning. You should NEVER pit people up against a numerically superior opponent without their awareness/consent though (as you WILL lose people due to this if done frequently enough).

5) In order for skill to ultimately prevail, you have to lean on that as the final deciding factor, and that means that particularly, at the upper end of the scale, right decision-making and player skill will determine the outcome, and not necessarily "character improvement". To that end, you have to ensure that "at max level", variances become more of a matter of playstyle choice, and that people utilizing those playstyles correctly, and playing with skill become the deciding factors, and not simply a numbers game.

Those are just some thoughts I have on the topic. The way "leveling" is done in many games really does set them up for long-term failure though. A large part of that though, imo, comes from too many devs "following the safe path" cut by their predecessors instead of taking the risk to go into uncharted waters and try new methods.

Post Script: A LOT of the comments make some damn good points, and I feel I could really +1 most of them. To me, it seems like a LOT of people would be fine with slower character improvement or "soft caps" so long as it doesn't prohibit them from content or participation in the game.

My question is now..... why do so many game devs seem stuck in their ways?

I don't like the concept of levelling up in principle. IMHO novice players of a game should have access to precisely the same gear that experienced players have, but the mechanic of the game then needs to such that naturally developed skill and ability that only experience can bring really brings rewards. I've rarely had such fun as when I used to play Ghost Recon with my clan. There were always so may places a sniper could hide and not be seen, but it usually needed a team mate to cover you. I still remember, years later, a particular round when I was the only player on my team remaining, and hiding in a bush I managed to win against the entire other team. I remember the tension, fear, and elation as I held off the attackers coming at me from multiple angles, and I remember the frustration, confusion and finally respect as I picked off the opposition one by one as they tried to take me out.

I don't like the concept of levelling up in principle. IMHO novice players of a game should have access to precisely the same gear that experienced players have, but the mechanic of the game then needs to such that naturally developed skill and ability that only experience can bring really brings rewards. I've rarely had such fun as when I used to play Ghost Recon with my clan. There were always so may places a sniper could hide and not be seen, but it usually needed a team mate to cover you. I still remember, years later, a particular round when I was the only player on my team remaining, and hiding in a bush I managed to win against the entire other team. I remember the tension, fear, and elation as I held off the attackers coming at me from multiple angles, and I remember the frustration, confusion and finally respect as I picked off the opposition one by one as they tried to take me out.

That's what gaming is all about in my book.

I'd say that's a different type of levelling to the one the article is talking about though, in RPG games levelling is a core mechanic to advance through the game, unlock new weapons, skills etc.

I agree with you about FPS multiplayer levelling systems and disappointed that Halo4 seems to have such a system now unlike the previous game Reach where the levelling system was purely cosmetic. I can see the need to reward people but I think it's unfair as people just starting the game are already at a disadvantage as they lack experience of the weapons, maps and game mechanics so a levelling system puts them at a further disadvantage which makes the game frustrating.

My question is now..... why do so many game devs seem stuck in their ways?

The cynical part of me would say to make money selling DLC, I'm sure that's exactly the reason BL2 has such an artificial level cap as they know people will be more likely to buy the DLC to get the level cap increased.

My question is now..... why do so many game devs seem stuck in their ways?

In many cases they aren't stuck in their ways as even the meaning behind old mechanics seem to disappear. -Process generated content and modular environments end up being used to shorten development time rather than extend player interest. -Leveling is used as a way of gating content rather than to slowly introduce new play methods for a player to incorporate.-Content is recycled to fill space rather than as a signal to players that they will experience something similar to their previous encounter.-Numeric values are used as an inducement to play rather than a method of communicating with the player.

It isn't so much that developers are stuck in their ways as that they are going through the actions without understanding the reasoning behind those actions.

Guild Wars 2 is one of the better examples of a game that understands the reasoning behind what it has done, but in my opinion it fails to deliver in it's automatic scaling. Your power level relative to your environment jumps around erratically from one zone to the next. It would seem like your gear fulfilling a percentage of your character's max capability in a zone would be better than their weird direct value scaling solution. Other than that though, they have presented a game where most if not all of the content seems to have been developed intentionally rather than as an accident of the method of creation.

Once you have every ability in the game, there's just nothing left after that point.

Look at The Secret World. You can literally acquire every single ability in the game with any one character in that game. At some point, you've gotten every ability, but LONG BEFORE that point, you've reached the point where you are no longer getting stronger.

A game where you gain stats by levelling just means that the monsters gain stats as well, which makes those levels empty and meaningless - a skinner-box technique to keep you playing longer.

Or to put it bluntly?

You're a sucker if you're willing to take more content that is actually not more content, but just the same content over and over again.

The game ends at some point. Deal with it. That's the nature of all games - at some point, there is no more content for you to explore. The only way to get around it is competitive play.

This is a fascinating perspective that raises so many questions. I've been playing Guild Wars 2 for weeks now -- to a lesser extent the game's design philosophy, and to a greater extent the community is trending toward an aversion and hatred for vertical progression of any sort. I also gathered the same sentiment from the TF2 community when they started adding item drops. I saw players wondering why TF2 didn't just grant you all the gameplay items at the start, items which, arguably, are a "horizontal" progression.

Is the anti-progression I have experienced some new-age phenomenon, or has there always been this community division between pro-progression and anti-progression? These seem to map roughly to the two big motivations of play: immersion (progression fulfills a satisfying power fantasy) VS challenge (play to get more skilled). Should developers cater to both crowds simultaneously?

I think this might very well be related to the aging gamer demographics. As people who were very big gamer in their youth get older, they tend to have less time to play.

Their experience makes them excellent gamers: they have the core skills to play games well, but cannot match the sheer amount of time that teenagers can put into gaming.

Games with gating mechanisms and vertical progression favor those with more time than skills. Even when they aren't playing competitive modes, skilled gamers with less time will have to slog through months of easy, boring content in order to get to play something that's meant to challenge them. I play Guild Wars 2 too. I don't have a lot of time to play, so I haven't yet attained level 80. Solo PvE in Guild Wars 2 at my level is boringly easy; but outside of PvP (which doesn't have progression at all), I am disadvantaged when I want to play the endgame content (for instance, in WvWvW, my equipment does not make me competitive).

And this is in a MMORPG that doesn't emphasise vertical progression!

Just one comment in regards to your observations of GW2.

WvWvW is not intended for a player to to be "solo Superman". If you go running around alone, thinking you're Billy Badass and going to conquer all..... you're sadly mistaken, because that portion of the game is really built on cooperative play. You might get away with a little bit, but as soon as you run into a group that knows what it's doing.... you're hosed. If you team up with others, you have a fighting chance.

In fairness though, GW2 is sadly missing a "duel" system (which, from recent Dev chatter, they intend to implement in the near-ish future).

Whatever happened to games that had base weapons that could best the upper-tier weapons through skill? You players of modern day fancy-pants games rely on a weapon upgrade system that nut-punches the base weapons through aim-fail algorithms and weak power in lieu of a true skill-based no-bs interference weapon, regardless of bullet power.

You shouldn't have to depend on leveling up to release a real scan-hit gun that provides true bullet travel and base power that allows a real skilled player to play well. These FPS games nowadays have turned once skill-orientated bragging-rights gaming into arm-chair WoW lazyness farming. There's no satisfaction in farming for days to get the BFG-SUX-5000 to spray and pray randomly to gain kills.

There shouldn't be levels and unlocking in FPS games. It's about skill, not farming. Leave that for the MMORPG's.